Hundreds of Caravan Migrants Deported to Honduras by Guatemalan Police, U.S. ICE Agents

Guatemalan police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents working in that country deported nearly 300 Honduran caravan migrants back to their own country. The ICE agents are on temporary assignment to Guatemala to help stop the flow of caravan migrants through that country to Mexico.

ICE agents and Guatemalan national police teamed up to sweep up the majority of about 300 caravan migrants who illegally crossed the border late last week, the Associated Press reported. The U.S. ICE agents are assigned to assist Guatemalan law enforcement authorities under an agreement negotiated by the Trump administration in 2019.

Chaos broke out at the border between Honduras and Guatemala last week as caravan migrants pushed past Honduran police to forcibly enter Guatemala, Breitbart Texas reported on Thursday.

Approximately 400 men, women, and young children made their way to the northern Honduran town of San Pedro Sula on Tuesday, the AFP reported. By Wednesday, the group refused to register with migration services in Honduras and began pushing their way past a line of police to cross into Guatemala — the first step on a journey that would take them into Mexico and on to the United States.

After Guatemalan authorities rounded up the migrants they loaded them onto buses and took them back to the Honduran border near the town of Corinto. The AP reported this as “effectively dashing their plans to travel together as a ‘caravan’ with hopes of reaching the United States.”

Elsewhere in Guatemala, police negotiated a deal with another group of migrants who entered without registering to take them back to the border and then ferry them back to the migrant shelter in Esquipulas. The town is located near the Guatemala-Honduras international border.

Officials said they expect many of the migrants to give up and return to their home country.

The AP reported that one of the migrants, 19-year-old Génesis Fuentes, participated in another migrant caravan in October 2018. She crossed the border into the U.S. in March 2019 after working in Mexicali, Mexico, as a waitress and cook for about five months. After illegally crossing the border into California, Border Patrol agents arrested her and deported her back to Honduras.

The Honduran woman reiterated that her quest is about looking for work and not about asylum.

“There is no work in Honduras,” Fuentes told the AP. “Since they deported us, we have not been able to find jobs.”

Another migrant, Jomas Joel Paredes of Villanueva, Honduras, admitted this is his fourth attempt to make his way to the U.S. He said he never made it all the way through Mexico to the U.S. border.